


No Brakes

by Lautremonde



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Explicit Language, Other, Vague angst, dramatic reunion, mild violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 10:55:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17140493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lautremonde/pseuds/Lautremonde
Summary: After the explosion at the Life Foundation, Eddie tries to get back to his life. But something is missing.An illustrated pinch-hit for the Symbrock Holiday Exchange.  Happy holidays Kairu_KitsuneO!  I hope you enjoy :)





	No Brakes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kairu_KitsuneO](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kairu_KitsuneO/gifts).



Their first kiss, there was someone else there. Anne watching － _participating_ － an external party to apply the brakes, to force them to reorient to their goal. Eddie and Venom had fallen back together, and sped off to face the insanity of their situation head on.

Then everything fell apart, and Eddie was alone again.

 

* * *

 

He doesn’t feel normal. He has cravings, he’s still eating oddly. He thinks he hears his name sometimes, in a deep voice － but in the same way he sometimes thinks he hears a tune ringing in his ears. He knows it’s not there.

Dan does him a favor by giving him a check-up off the books, given that Eddie doesn’t exactly have his health benefits back yet.

“You know,” Dan says conversationally, “Your organs seem fine. Maybe all that thrashing threw off the MRI results. Or maybe your tag-along distorted them somehow. If they were actually as badly atrophied as they looked, you’d have been dead by now.”

“Oh,” Eddie says. He’s having trouble conceptualizing his apparent graze with death, especially with the easy delivery of the news. “I guess that’s good.”

“Yeah,” Dan says, scrawling something on his clipboard. It doesn’t look like he’s writing on charts; more like the notepad paper Anne tends to buy for the apartment. “You know, there’s really no playbook for this, we don’t exactly have a precedent. Alive is good.”

“I…” Eddie trails off, screwing his face up. Dan waits patiently for him to continue, and Eddie feels awful to put them in this situation. It’s awkward to have your ex’s new beau as a doctor. But maybe he’s overdosed on awkward for a lifetime. “I don’t feel normal,” he finally says.

“I’d be worried if you did,” Dan says, “but how so?”

 

* * *

 

During his time with Venom, he oscillated between feeling invincible and utterly defenseless. He could admit, with the power of hindsight, that he’d done that his whole life too.

He’d felt invincible before taking an inadvisable skateboard jump in his adolescence, before getting run out of New York, before ruining his career and relationship with Anne. Each time, he should have known that the feeling that nothing could go wrong was nothing _but_ a feeling. And each time, he’d felt every inch of his crushing vulnerability afterwards, all the distances he had to fall.

He’d had a long reprieve with Anne, somebody to catch him before he hurtled joyfully off a cliff. But even without that to rely on, he should have been able to recognize the signs that he was getting too high on his own success.

When the details come out, the media chews through Carlton Drake’s legacy with all the grace and power of an engine biter, reducing the intricate machine of the Life Foundation to shrapnel, lingering over every fresh detail for a few weeks of frenzy. The lawsuit will take longer, but the court of public opinion is immediate, and it’s enough to get Eddie back to work. His boss hands him what should be simple tasks, fluff pieces.

He hits gold on his first assignment, busting a politician for some obvious corruption. His second too. He feels on the up. Like he has momentum.

Suddenly he has money again. He treats himself to food he’s never tried before, in volumes he never used to consider. This wouldn’t have been affordable, but he keeps his shithole apartment. He’s hardly home anyways, out succeeding and reveling in his success in turns.

(When he does return, the emptiness is there. He doesn’t really think a new place would help though. He still thinks he hears his name spoken in empty rooms, sometimes.)

His boss is starting to trust him enough to run loose again, though. The brakes are off, and so is Eddie － he dives directly into a rumor about girls dissapearing when responding to low-wage job offers.

Retrospectively, he recognizes the point where a normal person might have noticed they were in over their head. Probably before sneaking into a warehouse they suspected was filled with human cargo awaiting shipment. Definitely before being surrounded by armed men.

Somebody kicks at the back of his legs, and he drops to his knees.

“Aw, shit,” he breathes, putting his arms up － there’s no one to tell him not to.

“You really thought this was a good idea?” the man behind him asks.

And. No, he hadn’t thought this was a good idea. He’d hardly thought about this at all, had he? He’d thought about his momentum, about the people he could help, the admiration of his coworkers, the trajectory of his life, the after, the what came next. He hadn’t thought about what he still had yet to lose.

The barrel of a gun rustles his hair. He closes his eyes, breathing heavily. Someone chuckles.

He’s pistol whipped in the back of the head, and he’s down immediately － no black oozing armor, no super strength － except. _Except_.

His ears ring. He thinks he hears his name.

**HELLO, EDDIE.**

Oh. He does hear his name.

From the ground, vision tilting with vertigo, he sees the dropping bodies of the guards, and a black shape whipping through the air above him.

“The fuck,” Eddie wheezes. Something inexorably strong raises him to his feet, and he’s aware of an immense inky darkness at his back, slowly enveloping his torso.

He blinks, and his vision recenters － Venom healing him? He’s standing in the center of a ring of bodies. He pauses for a moment. There’s a pressure at his chest. It feels… like a hug?  


**I REALLY THOUGHT YOU COULD HANDLE YOURSELF, BUT** ** _APPARENTLY_** **YOU’RE STILL A PUSSY,** Venom says.

“Oh fuck you,” Eddie says, voice breaking as his hand scrabbles up to his chest to grasp at Venom’s mass, “where have you been?”

**RECOVERING.**

“Couldn’t have said anything, huh?”

There’s a vague sensation of smugness. Like maybe Venom wanted a dramatic reunion. A tendril of black brushes across his face. Eddie’s memory flickers to that kiss in the woods.

**I AM SAYING SOMETHING NOW.**

And then they are kissing － it’s different, without the structure of a human underneath Venom’s form. It’s yielding but unrelenting, warm and oddly dry. Overwhelming. A tendril brushes over his ear, tenderly.

The form of the tentacle though － TENDRIL. _Tendril_. Okay, so the shape of _things_ spark a memory, and his thoughts flicker to some inadvisable animated pornography he had seen.

**INTERESTING,** Venom says.

Eddie’s thoughts don’t have brakes, and there’s no one else to stop them.


End file.
